Everyone let me down. I can’t even bring myself to look at you. Not only did the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Adventure Mysteries Kickstarter fail to reach its goal, but it failed to reach less than a third of its measly $55,000 target. It’s like you actively didn’t want to pay so I could replay some games that I remember thinking I enjoyed about twenty years ago. You gits.

Fortunately, developer David Marsh says they’ll get made anyway. SO THERE.

It’ll just take a bit longer.

I can’t tell where irony ends and genuine desire to play these games begins, but either way, I’m pleased it’ll likely still happen. Marsh claims that he never needed the KS money to get the games made, and was partly using the project to raise awareness about them. Well, er, okay. I’m not sure it’s great politics to say, “I didn’t need your money” to the 559 people who pledged $17,430 between them. But it’s still good news to me that they’re happening.

Marsh insists that the $55k wouldn’t have been enough to cover the taxes on the pledges. I’m not sure how that works. But anyhow, you can keep up with the progress of the FMV-laden silliness here.

But that doesn’t feed the raging cynic boner that people in the gaming community and press have had since the Double Fine Kickstarter. A couple days after Double Fine’s KS launched there was a immediate shift in certain kinds of people towards wanting gaming Kickstarters as a whole go down in flames like the Hindenburg. Hell of a lot of confirmation bias going on here.

They wouldn’t have bothered to back any projects in the first place. Only backers matter, and I was a backer of this project. So: is this news a problem for me? NO.

1) If the Kickstarter had been successful, they would have been obligated to fulfil the preorders, and I would have been happy.

2) As a backer of the game, my entire “stake” in it was that I wanted the game to be made. (and also I want the reward tier I paid for, of course) It’s still going to be made in spite of not making it’s fundraising goal, which is more than can be said for several others I’ve backed.

3) Of course this project wasn’t aiming for raising all the funds needed to actually produce it. You just had to look at the reward tiers to figure that out.

4) If I send a project money, am I insulted if it turns out they use money other than the Kickstarter funds to develop the game? Of course not. Many projects set their numbers unrealistically low in terms of development costs, but a lot of them don’t get funded anyway.

I confess to being a Kickstarter cynic. After Double Fine, people started talking about how this changed game development funding, and my knee-jerk response has been: only for these anomalous, low-budget nostalgia products, and only in the short term – in a year, Kickstarter will be back to where it was before the hype (unless a big project fails and everyone flees Kickstarter). The thing is, I really hope I’m wrong. I want Kickstarter to be the beginning of a new, viable means of funding games where developers aren’t beholden to publishers. Unfortunately, on the balance however, I think my misgivings have more basis in reality than not.

For what it is worth I agree with you 100%. In my mind a Kickstarter is a way to accept donations to get a project off the ground that otherwise wouldn’t have been given a shot.

Ethically, if you don’t need the money don’t start the kickstarter. You are potentially taking money away from worthwhile projects that otherwise need the money.

I’m also a bit concerned that after their post about the ethics of Kickstarter coverage RPS don’t seem to think that there is a problem with Kickstarters lying to the community.

He says himself : “As you know, I never had the intention of using kickstarter to fund my company…” – No, we didn’t know that. David March is being patently dishonest. The word “Kickstarter” implies that the donations are there the kickstart the project. In this case it looks like it was just an attempty to get free money off the caboose of the Kickstarter gravy train.

Anyway, apologies if I am sounding a little shrill here but this is something I feel very strongly about.

Nah, he specifically mentioned that 55k would not cover the tax on the pledges themselves. This guy sounds like a classic bullshit artist. I hate to disappoint everyone but I don’t think we’re going to be seeing this game.

Anyway, like my mother says “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” and I appear to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

Seriously. I had to cut myself off. I’ve been eyeing a couple of them and hoping that they get themselves fully funded (Jane Jensen, I’m looking at you) so that I don’t feel so crippled with guilt about it all.

Amen to that. I’m starting to feel that I should be running through the streets grabbing people and yelling at them that they should be funding Starlight Inception. With a week left and $90k to go I’m hoping that some big news site gives them some great exposure.

This is the sad side of Kickstarter. Not so much the game not being made (FMV seems to only have nostalgia value) but the “eh, screw you lot, we never needed you in the first place!” attitude when something meets with a tepid response.

So basically the money required to make it was not needed, but in fact was? Wait a minute while I call Baker street to sort this out.

Also, are people basically giving their money for nothing then? Sure you don’t really need to know how it’s used as long as the games are made, and not all developers are doing this (or saying it honestly like that), but that still looks like an “easy” way to get some cash stored.

I’m not saying it’s a scam, but if I give my money, I want to know where it goes, and I want to know it’s used to actually make a game.

I know that it is only pledged, but what if the goal is reached? No one knows that the money was not required to make the product, and while the developing will go on, people will at some point give their money for real. For real, but for what use exactly?

I think it is healthy that not every single project get funded. It suggests the consumers/sponsors aren’t blindly throwing money at everyone who wants it but are trying to make informed sponsoring/purchasing decisions.

What speaks against this is of course that Leisure Suit Larry got funded.

I … vaguely remember playing those games. Ah, the days of FMV-laden silliness.

EDIT: I remember why I remember this game now. The game came with paper newspaper cutouts in the box related to each case which you could examine for clues within the game. That was a lovely touch. Didn’t think anyone was particularly interested in this type of game coming back though. Seems I was right.

Uh…I just the watched the 22 second video, and it completely turned me off the prospect of this project (was that the intent?). I didn’t see anything in there that suggested it’d be even remotely true to the original portrayal/personality of the character.

I’m going to go back to counting the days until Sherlock season 2 comes to the U.S. so we can find out how Sherlock and John manage to escape the booby trapped swimming pool…

The traditional “FMV games” should just remain dead. The only people I have ever seen/heard discuss them in a positive light is when they are being ironic and stating that those games were “so good”. If there was ever a video game genre equivalent of a hipster, FMV’s would be it.

Also, for people crying that the Sherlock Holmes game will still be made, regardless of funding. It’s a silly thing to whinge about. I’m making a game, and I would love to do it full time. $80000 would accomplish that, but since I don’t have $80000, I am working on it in my spare time. The game gets made regardless.

I see 2 possible problems here:
1. Either the market has spoken and they really don’t want these games and I think it would be unwise to listen to the market and go ahead and make them anyway.
or
2. There is genuinely a good market for the game and they simply didn’t know about the Kickstarter.

Either way, I think going ahead and making the game anyway might be doomed to fail. Then again, coming out and saying “I don’t need your stinkin’ money anyway” might generate enough press to market the game that way.. lol